So Facebook chat is really dumb, and doesn’t save chat history. If it does, getting to it is non-intuitive, and it’s just giving me another reason to dislike (hahaha) Facebook. As if I needed another reason.

ANYWAYS

Maker Faire was pretty damn awesome.

I could leave it at that, but my god that would be a disservice to everyone that wasn’t there and reads my blog, which translates into maybe 10 people, if you’re optimistic about the size of my readership. To sum up the experience, I don’t think I’ve been somewhere with so many cool geeks showing off cool things all in one place. And now, I’m just going to list what I saw:

Makerbot crews

Reprappers from around the area, and even some from Montana or Idaho

New reprap boards

A veritable lack of NYC reprappers

Man, I bet some hip-hop artist is going to pick up the tag ‘reprapper’

Just watch

I did NOT get to see arc attack. Quite disappointing, something crazy stuff about ‘room capacity’ and ‘public safety’

The local hackerspace booths: NYC Resistor (I have to say Metrix’s hobo token is much more badass), Alpha One Labs

Lock picking booth run by TOOOL. Didn’t manage to crack their locks, but I only spent 3 minutes at their booth

Epilog laser (should we make our space green, or get a laser cutter?! Oh, the agony!), Autodesk, some commercial 3D printers

mathematica playing cards. Seriously. They’ll likely be the geekiest cards I’ll ever have

lots of LEDs

guy that played guitar while wearing a monitor on his head

luminescent fluid in tubes

HUGE LED arrays, with separately attached LEDs.

monome-like devices

cart-based youtube video uploader

the reverse geocache guy

over priced fair food, of course

microsoft attempting to shoulder into the hobbyist electronics market

book scanners: at least two guys were doing it

guy in a 3-4m tall germ suit

jet-powered fair ride

biobus!

sparkfun!

open STM (scanning tunneling microscope)!

lots of people trying to sell shirts and stuff

3D light show with yarn and a projector

hydroponics

talk by a dude that wants to use the building-top water containers as a city-wide cosmic ray detector

learned exactly how pressure waves kill people in explosions

listened to Wolfram talk, which was somewhat disappointing because all he did was do random stuff with Mathematica and push his cellular automata based view of the world

talk by the creator of scratch

talk by the creator of lilypad

talks by lots of people that wrote books

derived statistic: child would have to work full time on getting kidnapped for some 750,000 years for it to certainly be kidnapped. I have some qualms about this derived stat, but it’s interesting none-the-less

I thought the talk titled ‘Sustainable hacker spaces’ was going to about making hackerspaces green. Nope! It was about how to keep the hacker space alive, a much more pressing concern

conductive play dough

guys that want to stick gardens on the top of buses. They’re not entirely crazy, either!

Okay, I really have to get back to… um, doing homework. And listening to trippy japanese pop. Yeah.

Oh! And Dresden Codak AND Methods of Rationality both updated within a day of each other! Yudkowsky and Diaz must be conspiring together, or something (sadly, this doesn’t even seem to be that far-fetched).